Total Page views
I want to get an understanding of my traffic and what has worked best for me in this first 10 months of my blog from February to December 2012. I will be using Google analytics to look at the most successful posts I have had. I am not sure what the outcome will be yet but let’s have a look.
Total stats for the time my site has been live
- Visits: 20,540
- Unique Visitors: 16,615
- Pageviews: 34,667
- Pages / Visit: 1.69
- Avg. Visit Duration: 00:01:33
- Bounce Rate: 75.13%
- % New Visits: 80.88%
It is difficult to get any real insights from these stats; however there are a couple of things that are worth looking at.
From the pages/visit I can see the engagement with the site as a whole is not great, this is something I have tried to fix today by changing the menu structure of the site, and I will have to see if it works. This is also reflected in the bounce rate.
I do however have just fewer than 20% returning visitors which is not too bad.
Audience Tab insights from Google Analytics
Geographical breakdown of my site
|
1 |
United States |
6,489 |
1.3 |
00:00:38 |
88.73% |
79.84% |
|
2 |
United Kingdom |
6,411 |
2.42 |
00:03:12 |
64.78% |
65.93% |
|
3 |
Canada |
1,035 |
1.44 |
00:01:00 |
87.15% |
76.62% |
|
4 |
India |
999 |
1.45 |
00:01:13 |
89.39% |
75.48% |
|
5 |
Australia |
496 |
1.42 |
00:00:52 |
91.94% |
77.82% |
|
6 |
(not set) |
316 |
1.36 |
00:00:46 |
85.44% |
80.38% |
|
7 |
Philippines |
304 |
1.49 |
00:01:10 |
91.78% |
77.96% |
|
8 |
Netherlands |
296 |
1.36 |
00:00:58 |
80.07% |
77.36% |
|
9 |
France |
288 |
1.34 |
00:00:43 |
90.28% |
88.54% |
|
10 |
Italy |
189 |
1.31 |
00:00:46 |
86.77% |
80.95% |
This is also interesting, I am a UK based site however my biggest single audience is the United States (just) however I have a broad spread of visitors from around the world.
Other insights taken from the audience category of Google Analytics
The most popular browser is Chrome and the most popular OS is Window, 20% of my traffic comes from a mobile source with 50% of these coming via Apple devices.
Insights tab from Google analytics
There are some interesting insights to be gained here, these are:
- I need to ensure my website is mobile optimized (which it is)
- Any advertisers should be targeted at the right market
Traffic Sources from Google analytics
Main overview statistics
25.94% Search Traffic – 5,328 Visits
50.07% Referral Traffic – 10,284 Visits
22.71% Direct Traffic – 4,664 Visits
1.29% Campaigns – 264 Visits
It is clear that the main source of my traffic comes in via Referrals however there is a large chunk of traffic that comes in via Search and Direct sources.
Traffic Sources tab
Source/Medium Visits Avg. Visit Duration
1 google / organic 5,195 00:01:49
2 (direct) / (none) 4,664 00:00:59
3 t.co / referral 3,866 00:00:48
4 linkedin.com / referral 1,541 00:01:26
5 stumbleupon.com / referral 1,133 00:00:49
6 triberr.com / referral 805 00:05:49
7 google.com / referral 374 00:00:37
8 hootsuite.com / referral 346 00:00:29
9 google.co.uk / referral 197 00:00:46
10 facebook.com / referral 162 00:03:18
The big 4 referral networks that generate traffic for me are Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon and Triberr, a lot of the twitter traffic also comes in via Triberr.
Other insights from Traffic Sources
Most of my organic traffic is coming via image searches, 9 out of the top 10 Google search terms are from Image search. My image optimization is working well. The best referral site is Facebook as far as engagement goes.
Content insights from Google Analytics
My Top 10 pages
These are my top 10 posts for the year to date let’s see where next year takes me.
What I have learned
There are vast amounts of things Google analytics can show you about your site. In this brief exercise I now know the following:
- I need to find a way to increase engagement and page views on the site
- I am getting a lot of international traffic, as I will be looking to get some genuine advertisers on the site I need to ensure that they are after my target demographic
- Social media is working well for me, keep it up
- Google image search optimization is working however the organic search is not, this needs to improve
- There is no real trend on the posts that do best, keep the mix up.
- Focus on my niche more
I would love to hear your thoughts on how my site is doing please please comment below
Your Triberr traffic seems to be spending most time on site followed by facebook. Will be interesting to see if this can be maintained and grown when you focus more on niche.
Yes that will be interesting, The way I think it may happen is facebook will increase and triberr will go down
Paul, one comment I would add looking at this: As a blog, I don’t believe 1.7 pages per visit is a bad number. Most of your traffic is likely coming directly to an individual post in response to a promotion of that post, as opposed to a typical business site that often brings traffic into a main page and leads traffic from there into more granular pages.
Congrats, nice first year stats!
Hi Eric
Thanks for the feedback, it is also great to get a more experienced bloggers feedback on my site.
Thanks for the Interest and sharing my posts
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